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23 July 2015

I love them in the same way I love the National Gallery. I'm glad they exist because they're a sign that, as a society, we choose to spend time and resources on more than just the mundane essentials. That said, they have little to do with the realities of daily journalism.

06 July 2015

I don't care where my radio comes from, at least in terms of the technology,

As a youngster I heard the early days of Radio Leeds, and later, with much excitement, the launch of Bradford's Pennine Radio on a little AM pocket transistor my parents had in the house.

Now radio in all its forms is delivered by a bewildering multiplicity of apps, devices and channels (radio on the TV anyone? yes, around 5% listen via digital TV according to OFCOM) I'm worried that it's being turned into something alien; an exclusive commodity to be bought rather than something free and universally available.

30 June 2015

I’m on the bed in a Leeds city centre hotel room with a half-dressed girl I’ve just met.

We’re alone, surrounded by her intimate possessions – clothes,
dressing gown, make up – and we’re talking about love, and life. She
gently raises my fingers to her throat to feel the pulse in her neck.

A nymph, not unlike her bronze sisters I’ve just left
behind in City Square, this girl is easily young enough to be my
daughter. She strokes my arm as she talks and cajoles, and then plants a
bright red lipstick kiss on the back of my hand.

It’s theatre. But Toto, in this piece I originally wrote for the Leeds Culture Vulture website, I’ve a feeling we’re not in the plush velvet stalls at The Grand anymore.

27 June 2015

Radio's dead. It's official .. there's been a notice in the Telegraph.

OK, maybe not dead but dying, according to Gillian Reynolds, on licence fee life support and Osborne's hand is on the switch. Oh hang on ... she's not talking about radio, she's talking about BBC Radio 4.

Which of course is radio if you're in London and you're writing a column for a posh broadsheet, allowing for a bit of Radio 3 when the Proms are on and maybe the frisson of a brief liaison with 6 Music if we're feeling frisky.

Don't get me wrong. I'd be sad if Radio 4 died, or became severely emaciated. It's one of those things that makes the country worth defending, and for which I'd certainly go to the barricades.

But radio is a lot more than Radio 4, which is local radio to London and the South East in the same way that Crossrail is an affordable little transport upgrade and the National Theatre has something on worth seeing now and then. I started looking around the dial, and at online listen again services, on just one Saturday in June here in Yorkshire.

11 May 2015

Today we mark a sad anniversary. It's thirty years since the
Bradford City fire disaster in which 56 fans lost their lives. They
went to a football match to celebrate their team's promotion, and
never came home.

The events of that day are etched in our national memory and, as
so often, radio captured the raw emotion of the moment so much more
powerfully than mundane pictures.

They also highlight something about radio that is too often forgotten in our industry today. Beyond the brands, and the promotions, and the personalities radio has a unique ability to bring people together and to communicate better than the echo chambers and troll-infested swamps of what we now call "social media".

04 March 2015

I'm delighted that Australia's High Court
has upheld a contested ruling that the radio station responsible for a stupid prank call to a hospital nurse in London in the middle of the night broke the law.

The judgement overturns an earlier decision which ruled the regulator had no power to sanction Sydney's 2Day FM over the harrassment of the nurse, who was bullied by two presenters who posed as members of the Royal family to trick her into transferring their hoax call to members of the medical team treating the Duchess of Cambridge for
morning sickness in 2012.

Brief Bio

After spending my youth as a radio hack at Pennine Radio and The Pulse of West Yorkshire, where I ended up as News Editor, I'm proud to have helped more than 400 broadcast journalists enter the profession over the past 22 years.

I was honoured to receive the BBC's 'Developing Talent' Achievement Award in 2012. I currently serve as a member of the Radio Academy's Yorkshire branch committee, I'm on the board of the Broadcast Journalism Training Council and I'm a judge - for the third time - in the 2015 BBC Gillard Awards.

Here I combine comment on the radio industry, journalism training and my professional life with observations on cultural and community developments in my home patch of Leeds and Bradford.